So picture this. Only one vehicle comes by in the 45-minute respite we put in out there at what was once Highland, Iowa. It starts a slow climb up the hill from the north, a trapezoid of dust spreading widely out into dissolution behind it. It's a truck, a pick-up.
Surprise.
There's something of a parent in every teacher, I suppose, and as I watch the pick-up approach I'm concerned about my students. Not for their safety—no one's in danger of getting picked off by the only moving vehicle in five or six miles. I'm concerned, almost maternally, with how this scene looks, my sixteen kids scattered like milkweed pods through the ditches of this dusty old corner.
I just know it's going to be some stocky farmer coming by, and he's going to tell himself once again how cock-eyed education seems to be nowadays. He'll tell himself how the whole lot of us would learn a ton more if we'd do something worth doing with our hands. I'm thinking that he's going to read "Dordt College" on the side of the van and wonder why he gave a hundred bucks to the last fund drive when all those professors do is stand around with their hands in their pockets, that bearded one up by the cemetery, too. Plain nuts is what it is.
But it's not an old farmer at the wheel of that pick-up. It's a young farmer's wife, her child strapped in a baby seat beside her. I don't know her at all, but once I pick out her features, I think I know her people. You see, the prairie's own indefatigable seasons force people either to put down roots or be blown away. Northwest Iowa, I've long thought, is a sociologist's dream. Ethnic and religious conclaves still cling to the breast of this land as if the prairie were actually offering sustenance. I live in one such place. Change doesn't happen quickly when your very survival costs as much as it does. So out here, tribes of people hold as fastidiously to their folkways as they do to the land itself. Once I see her, I know her people.
The woman in the pick-up is, I think, a "mud-cricker," as some folks are fondly named, a member of the Apostolic Brethren who worship in a huge church some forty miles north of here. Either that or she's Netherlands Reformed, of the most fundamentalist stripe. I can tell by her hair—it’s not cut, not one inch, but spun into a round, fat donut and pinned to the back of her head. She wears no make-up, nothing, and she's not gaunt or thin; only her clothes and her hair make her look like something from the Depression.
I confess. I harbor a prejudice about those people when I see them in town shopping. Their women look exactly alike--same hair bun pinned up behind, same make-up-less clarity in their skin, same denim jumper draped halfway to the ankle and worn over a colorless blouse. When I see those women with a brood of kids, I think of them as people who are afraid of life, fearful of modern ways, scared to death of what they'd the "worldliness" all around them in Sioux County, Iowa.
So the moment I see this woman in the truck, I'm thinking that she's going to be scared to see all the college kids out here where Highland once was, none of them dressed as she is, most of the female students with their hair jammed up into baseball caps. We must be a strange sight out here at the ghost town, something unusual, I'm thinking. If she lives just down road, she's probably worried sick because we're so close to her nest.
But then she waves, not politely, as prairie-dwellers often do, in an effort to be neighborly. She doesn't raise a finger off the steering wheel or pick up her hand perfunctorily. She waves big at us—and she smiles.
She moves slowly through the students dotting the gravel road; and when she sees me, the old guy, she smiles so big that what she offers us was like her own apostolic welcome wagon. She doesn't look at all afraid.
I'm surprised. I'm flabbergasted. I didn't expect something so joyous from such a dour Christian sister.
She broke the stereotype--my stereotype, and forced me to try to guess why.
Here's what I figure: This is her land, too—Highland, Iowa. When she awakens in the morning out on the plains, maybe she sees the same sky as we do outside her kitchen window, the same land gently unfurling west to the river. Maybe this young mother knows the landscape too. She sees it. Maybe she's spent some time as a transparent eyeball, even though she may never have heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or, if she did, called him a godless heretic before she ever got to page two.
This young woman smiles at me because maybe she likes the idea of sharing her own vision of the prairie, her prairie—that’s what I'm thinking. She sees what we're doing and she likes what we're liking out here where Highland used to be. She likes what she sees because she likes what we're seeing.
But it's time to get back. I round up the students, get them in the van, and drive back to town—ten minutes at most. Not much is said, and when I leave the gravel and turn back on the blacktop, I show them the farm place adjacent to the corner, where there's an old shed out back with a phony roof line, the square kind that used to stand in every Midwestern town from the Ohio River to Oregon.
"See that building back there with the old square front?" I say. "That's the only building left from Highland. Somebody moved it to this farm place. Somebody once told me it was the blacksmith shop."
Nobody says much.
"Last year the people there lost a son in their own farm grove--three years old, I think." It happened. "The boy stumbled into an old well. Just a kid," I tell them. "The whole area came out to help search for him, and a deputy sheriff found him when he slipped into that well himself."
Nobody says a word. There's a little commemorative sign on the front lawn of that farm place for the child who is still sorely missed, and I point it out, just north from the solitary building left from a village that was once called Highland, Iowa.
And that was writing class one day, early fall, last year. We didn't review grammar or critique essays. We didn't combine sentences or peruse the great writers. Instead we went to a ghost town on the prairie, a place I wanted them to see.
About an hour later, I got two e-mails with about the same message. "Dr. Schaap, Thanks for taking us out there today. I really loved it."
I think it was the space that did it, the quiet, the reverent silence.
In my twenty years of teaching at this college, I've never seen kids more pious than they are today. Many of them wear T-shirts that celebrate their faith as if it were something to sell. Hundreds throng fast-paced Sunday evening worship services they put together themselves. Dozens and dozens enter our annual poetry contest with heartfelt lines, less poetry than testimony, faith-soaked sentiment that celebrates the Lord's own hand in their lives or asks him to come even closer. There's no end to vital and noisy Christianity today on a Christian college campus. Spirituality throbs from their praise choruses.
I wanted my students to see the prairie, to see God's own immensity in the sheer expansive landscape. I wanted them to see and to smile, like the woman with her hair in a bun.
I've got my reasons for class at Highland. Just for a moment, I wanted us out there, to be still and to know that He is God.
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